Why the Imaginary Needs the Imagination

This article reexamines the contested status of imagination in contemporary politics by analyzing the disjunction between theorization of “the imagination” and accounts of “the social imaginary” since the mid-1960s. I argue that what is at stake in the separation between the two concepts are different notions about the status of reality and its relationship to agency in imaginative thought and action—a separation that may imperil our ability to make historical and political judgments about emancipatory change. First, I reconstruct the shift from a mimetic to creative concept of imagination in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the implications this transformation had for thinking about the relationship between reality and agency. Next, I show how Marx and Engels, through their critique of “ideology” in nineteenth-century German idealism, sought a unified materialist account of reality and agency, but in terms that were increasingly seen as problematic by many twentieth-century social theorists. Finally, I evaluate the rejection of the Marxist concept of ideology in postwar French social theory and Cornelius Castoriadis’s subsequent writings on the putatively emancipatory character of radical imaginaries. In conclusion, I suggest that for all the analytical and political gains that the social imaginary approach offers, the status of reality and the purpose of agency within this approach remain open questions which may require the recovery and reintegration of the insights of older theories of imagination and ideology.